Lockdown Presents.

Lockdown Presents started in April 2020, almost by accident. Steffen and his co-founder Simone Girardeau were looking to mark a family member's 83rd birthday while everyone was stuck at home. Simone suggested asking a cellist friend, whose diary had just emptied, to drop into the family Zoom and play a few pieces. The performance was warm, personal, and genuinely moving, and a reminder that a lot of talented musicians had just lost their income, and a lot of people at home would pay to feel something that intimate again.

The two of them turned it into a platform. Lockdown Presents booked professional musicians for private virtual concerts, structured as a social enterprise: eighty per cent of the gig fee and a hundred per cent of tips went directly to the musician, and the profits the business retained were donated to charity. It was a way to keep working musicians paid during the months their usual work disappeared, and to put live performance back into homes at a time when it had gone silent.

Most of the growth came through earned channels, not paid ones. The site was built to convert the two audiences it served, bookers looking for a distinctive gift and musicians looking for work, and then surfaced through SEO and a PR push. It ranked highly on Google for the relevant searches, and was featured in national press including the Telegraph and the Metro, on radio, and on television. Each piece of coverage brought a wave of bookings and a new cohort of musicians onto the roster, which in turn justified more coverage.

The company ran for a couple of years, covering the period when those channels were genuinely useful. The work sits in the Voll toolkit as the clearest example of what digital marketing can do when the product is right and the story is worth telling.